Buster and Ned Glass (who later played "Doc"
in "West Side Story"),
as Civil War veterans recalling their glory days at a rest home
in "Mooching Through Georgia", Columbia Pictures, 1939.

eaton's
career after the lost years at MGM has always been a stumbling block
for writers. Wanting so desperately to provide a happy ending,
biographers generally skip the next 15 years of Keaton's life, jump
immediately to his rediscovery in 1949 and zoom along in a whirlwind
to his last hours in 1966. If those missing years are mentioned at all,
the suggestion is that Keaton did nothing during that time, losing his
career and even his creativity in the process. The suggestion is wrong.
What Keaton did lose was control. The ability to make his own creative
decisions was taken away from him and would never fully return.

Some assume that Keaton's career was ruined by
the coming of sound, that he just wasn't suited to making anything but
silent films. Anyone who has seen the rare French film Le roi des Champs-Elysées
(King of the Champs-Elysées), made in 1934, knows that Keaton could
make as good a sound film as anyone. Too bad Le roi des Champs-Elysées
was never released in the United States; it might have returned him
to stardom. Despite the fact that Buster was still drinking when Le
roi des Champs-Elysées was made, it is a charming film, with a solid
plot, good direction and full of typical Keaton touches. It would be
the last of its kind until the end of his career, when he made The Railrodder
in 1965.

The truth about the years from 1933 to 1949 is
that he worked continuously throughout the '30s and '40s, appearing
in numerous short films for Educational and Columbia, as well as a few
films in Europe.

Keaton's favorite (and best)
short for Educational was "Grand Slam Opera", made in
1936.

Here, he aspires to dance
like Fred Astaire in two mirrored sequences.

The story follows Buster as
a hopeful who wants to win a prize by juggling on the radio, which
is, of course, no less absurd than ventriloquism on the radio.

By 1937, after pulling himself together "by
sheer will," free of alcohol and the unwanted and barely remembered
second wife, Keaton was also back at MGM as a gagwriter, earning less
than one-tenth of his previous salary. Through it all, he supported
his whole family: father, mother, younger sister and brother (and his
brother's wife and child) on his by-then meager earnings. "He was
determined that Louise and I would get the schooling that he never had,"
reported brother Harry Keaton.

Buster and Lorna Gray (Adrian Booth) in
"Pest from the West", a 1939 Columbia 2-reeler
remake of "The Invader".

His film and television appearances throughout
the '40s, '50s and early '60s assure us that Keaton's comic mind still
functioned well. The material is often shoddyan
unfortunate irony after his troubles at MGMbut
moments of brilliance emerge, mostly when the assorted writers and directors
get out of the way and allow Keaton to do what he knew best: visual
and physical gags unencumbered by bad direction and complicated storylines.
These few gems harken back, not to the days of his greatest achievements,
but to his earlier work on stage, to the short films with Fatty Arbuckle,
and sometimes to his own two-reelers.

It was on the stage, where Keaton got his start,
that much of the best work of his later years was presented. Throughout
his life, he found working before a live audience a tonic. Once he could
no longer control his films, Keaton turned again to the theater audiences
that had made him a star at age five.

He went back to the stage as early as 1941, touring
the country in a detective play called The Gorilla, which the Ritz Brothers
had filmed in 1939. One local paper reported, ". . . he gave an
audience that was alternately amused and amazed a flash of his former
comic genius. For a few inspired moments in the middle of the crackpot
play, he had a chance at the kind of bewildered pantomine [sic] that
made him a great man, not so many years ago, and he established that
the silent mischief he used to make in the movies was no mere photographic
trickery."

His greatest stage successes were often in Europe,
but occasionally in the U.S., as when he starred in the Broadway touring
company of Once Upon a Mattress for nearly a year. Keaton seldom failed
to impress the other performers or bring cheers from the audience. Billy
Beck, who worked with Keaton at the Cirque Medrano in Paris revealed:
"The clowns in the show used to gather in the entranceway, in the
shadows, watching him each night. Myself and the other clowns were amazedthat's
just about the only thing I can say."

Buster joins a sideshow in his
pursuit of a magician's assistant (Marlyn Stuart)
in "Mixed Magic", an Educational short, 1936.